by Wendy Lesser
I hesitate even to use words like “teach” and “value” in this context, for fear of seeming to ally myself with some cockamamie School of Practical Philosophy. There is, as it happens, a real organization of that name. It advertises itself, mainly in placards on the New York subway, as a place that
takes the master philosophies of East and West and examines how they can be put to immediate use. It draws on the great teachers of mankind who have always taught about the true nature of man, his purpose in the world, and how to live a happy, content and useful life. Above all, it is PRACTICAL Philosophy, and so it is easy to test in experience and to apply in daily life.
Riding the subway one recent October and reading this dreck, I began to have serious doubts about my Hume project. Was this what I had thought of doing with him—putting him to immediate use, applying him in daily life? No wonder he had resisted me. And no wonder the professional philosophers had retreated to the level of if p then not not-p, with these promises and slogans (“It is philosophy that guides and inspires the finest life”) as their perceived alternative. It began to seem a kind of paradox: I could only be taught something by David Hume if I tried very hard not to think about him as having something to teach.
But why need this be such a difficult prospect? I am used to thinking of novels, movies, plays, and operas in this way. The more their moral tone is evident, the less I trust them. I want to sink myself into their element, be unwittingly influenced by them, and feel at least two different, contradictory effects by the time I emerge. I do not expect, in that sense, to be taught by works of art, except insofar as that verb can be broadly applied to any kind of mental transformation.
I have not always felt this way. When I was very young and took the nineteenth-century novelists as my only standard, I often demanded to know what the moral of something was. But increasingly, as I grow older, I find myself less insistent on comprehensible moral instruction and more drawn to things I can't fully understand. An unfortunate side-effect of this recent preference for indirection is that I'm becoming a worse and worse classroom instructor. That is, on those relatively few occasions when I am called upon to teach, I seem less and less able to do it. Faced with remarkable works of literature, I find I can no longer explicate them: I just want to set them out and have them taken up as their own Exhibit A, their own best defense. (The other day, hiding in the ladies’ room during one of the seemingly endless sessions of a seminar I was guest-professoring, I overheard two of my students chatting about me in the adjoining cubicles. “She's obviously very intelligent,” said one, “but all she ever says is that things are ‘interesting.’ ”The remark cut me to the quick, in part because it seemed so accurate.)
I don't know why I should have expected David Hume's writing to be any more instructive or useful than other works of art. What drew me to him in the first place, after all, was that he thought of himself as a literary man as well as a philosopher. Or rather, he was a philosopher because he was a literary man, and vice versa. The two impulses, in him, did not come apart. In his brief autobiographical “My Own Life,” written just before he died, Hume mentions that he “was seized very early with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life, and the great source of my enjoyments.” Then, in the very next sentence, he reintroduces this passion as “an unsurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning”— as if these two pursuits were literature, or its direct translation.
Some of the seeming contradiction, of course, stems from a change in vocabulary: what Hume meant by “literature” might more commonly be called either “writing” or “scholarship” today. But those two modern substitutes are themselves far from identical, and even the shift from a single term to two masks a whole set of attitudes about professional experts, their readers, and the function of literary style. We live, now, on the other side of that divide, but Hume's imagined readership had not yet split apart into people who studied philosophy because it was their job to do so, and people who read essays because they wanted to hear a voice speaking to them. In his mind (or perhaps it was only in his wishful longings), these audiences were still one.
That the rot had begun to set in even in Hume's lifetime is suggested by his own essay called “Of Essay Writing.” In this odd little piece—one of the things he pointedly left out of his collected writings, though it had appeared briefly in an 1742 edition of his Essays Moral, Political, and Literary—he complained about the divison between lively society and the world of scholarship. Or, as he said:
The Separation of the Learned from the conversible World seems to have been the great Defect of the last Age, and must have had a very bad Influence both on Books and Company: For what Possibility is there of finding Topics of Conversation fit for the Entertainment of rational Creatures, without having Recourse sometimes to History, Poetry, Politics, and the more obvious Principles, at least, of Philosophy?… On the other Hand, Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company. By that means, every thing of what we call Belles Lettres became totally barbarous, being cultivated by Men without any Taste of Life or Manners, and without that Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression, which can only be acquir'd by Conversation.
A valid complaint even now—though there is a slight taint of Humean snobbery in that allusion to Manners. But leaving aside the class issues (always hard to do with Hume, which may be in part why I abandoned him), leaving aside the question of whose richly laden dinner tables and well-appointed salons are to provide the ideal forums for Conversation, I would still want to insist that he has a point here. We too are starved for intelligent conversation—which Hume identifies, in this essay, with female conversation. (He obviously means this as a compliment, but the compliment feels ever-so-slightly patronizing, and I like to think that it could even have been his eventual awareness of this bad-faith tone which made him decide to withdraw the essay—though in saying this I'm probably just reading my own biases into his, as I am so often tempted to do.) And that kind of conversation, that kind of intelligence, can't arise if the scholars and the society ladies, the professionals and the amateurs, the people who look deeply into one small thing and the people who skate gracefully over many, do not pool their resources.
The fact that Hume could write this essay at all suggests that he thought the situation could still be retrieved. Or maybe he thought so, and then thought better. Perhaps this, finally, is why he chose to suppress “Of Essay Writing”: because the essay itself seems to attribute so much power to its own form, in a manner that is both immodest and inaccurate. The salvation of the culture, the joining of the “learned” and the “conversible,” cannot reasonably be said to rest in the hands of the essayist.
And if such writing could not, in the end, alleviate the problem in Hume's time, it certainly cannot in ours. The gap has widened even further now; the degree of slippage has only increased. You can see this, for instance, in Hume's casual assumptions about “what we call Belles Lettres.” It's clear from the way he words the passage that history, poetry, politics, and philosophy—the things he is classifying as belles lettres—also qualify as learned scholarship. That the two could be considered equivalent would deeply surprise twenty-first-century academics, who tend to use belles-lettristic as one of their chief terms of abuse, a rough synonym for not serious or suspiciously well-written.
If I sound excessively grumpy about this, it's because I am. I know it shouldn't matter to me what academics do, since I am not one of them. It certainly doesn't matter to most of America, or even to most of the Englishspeaking world. But the things I care about are so closely allied to the pursuits of academia that I find it painful to acknowledge the vast degree of separation between us. Like Hume, I long for a world in which the things I am interested in and the things people study in universities could be considered overlapping, if not identical— whereas they only seem to be getting farther and f
arther apart, so that from my present vantage point Hume's period looks like a golden age, even if he found it less than satisfactory.
Part of what I long for is that “interestingness” (for the student was right, this quality is key for me) should be something that matters. To be interesting is to be interesting to someone, to have a relationship with one's audience. I am not saying I manage to practice this consistently myself, but it is still a standard I apply to the artworks and experiences I care about. It is a standard that cannot be standardized, because it all comes down to what the individual reader or listener or watcher finds interesting. And yet it is crucial all the same. This is what I constantly find myself trying to explain to academics, generally with no success. They always seem to be trying to get rid of what they call the “personal element” in forming judgments, whereas I am always trying to put it back in.
I have lived, for most of my adult life, in the ever-widening no-man's-land between the kingdom of Learning and the realm of Conversation. It is more than likely that the desire to bridge the gap between these two worlds had a large part in making me want to write a book about David Hume, and it is equally likely that the impossibility of building such a bridge is what prevented me, in the end, from writing it.
I have a Scottish friend named James—Jim, he's called, by everyone who knows him. He has not lived in Scotland for many years, but he still thinks of himself as deeply Scottish (even unconsciously, if thought can be said to be unconscious). In the weekly column he writes for a London periodical, he almost always inserts an anecdote about a Scottish writer or a piece of Scottish news or an event in Scottish history, and I always wonder, when I read these mentions, whether he is doing it on purpose, or whether the decision to include such items just comes over him afresh each week, as if for the first time. Though he now lives some distance from his native Glasgow, Jim faithfully celebrates Burns Day every January; I believe he's even taught his Russian wife to cook haggis. When he drinks heavily into the night (as he did the night he learned of Thom Gunn's death, for he loved Thom Gunn), his favorite tipple is a good malt Scotch. And he still sounds Scottish, even after more than half a lifetime spent in England and France.
When I told Jim that I was thinking of writing a book about David Hume, he seemed pleased if skeptical. (The Scots are always skeptical, even about the things that give them the most pleasure—perhaps especially about those things.) And then, when I told him why I was giving it up, he was scathing in the best Scottish manner: “He turned out to be ‘too stuck in the eighteenth century’ for you? My god, what did you expect?” (I am not going to reproduce the Scottish pronunciation—I detest dialogue that is written in dialect—but you can imagine it for yourself.) “Did you think David Hume was going to be a contemporary San Franciscan, all warm and cozy and politically correct? Are you shocked at his old-fashioned opinions? Is that what you mean by calling him ‘snobbish’?” And so on, in that vein.
I was both miffed and amused by this tirade, both embarrassed and defensive. What had I thought? What had I actually wanted Hume to do for me? Was it, in fact, wrong of me to have wanted anything at all from him? Was practicality inimical to scholarship?
I still don't know the answer to this. It would be simplest to answer that final question with a yes, to say that biographical and critical investigation needs to be disinterested if it is to be any good at all. But it is not in me to yield on this point entirely. Something about the nature of my own enterprise in life—the way I find myself imposing my personality on everything around me and observing things through the screen of that personality— makes me believe in the ineradicability of the individual perspective. And Hume, in a grand and disinterested way, has encouraged me in that belief.
So let me go back to the earlier question and ask again, seriously, what it was I thought Hume could do for me. Prove me right? But he was not in the business of proving anything. Offer me underlying principles of judgment? Nix on that one, too. Give me access to a lost world in which the life of the mind and the life of art and the life of sensory pleasure still seemed to be connected?
Ah. So that was it. It was not Hume who had failed to be sufficiently modern, but I who could not reach backward in time to clasp that eighteenth-century hand. I was stuck here, now, in this place with all its shortcomings, in this time with all its flaws.
Sometimes, when I have felt particularly despairing about the present moment, I have cheered myself up with the thought that we do, after all, still have all the great artworks that came before us. We can read Henry James and David Hume, we can go to an Ibsen play or a Handel opera, and they are as alive for us, as present to us, as they could ever be to anyone. This is one of the terrific things about art: it takes you out of yourself, and for the duration of your encounter with it (if it is a successful encounter), you are transformed into something or someone slightly outside of time. It lets you feel there are occasional escape hatches from the tunnel-like plod to the grave, unexpected side-exits off the otherwise oneway street.
There is something pathetic, though, about someone whose best friends, at the present moment in time, are Henry James and David Hume. I want to have living friends, too. I want the conversation to be mutual and permeable to change. I want to feel that other people, alive right now, care about the same things I do. This, perhaps, is why I keep returning to the performing arts, seeking out the kind of experience you can only get at plays and operas and concerts—the sense that there is a living bond connecting the people in the audience and the people onstage, making them all a party to an event which is also a feeling and at the same time a critical response. Attending a performance can, at its best, annihilate the gap I've been complaining about: between the eighteenth century and now, between learning and conversation, between thought and feeling, between the living and the dead.
Not that this happens every time. In fact, it almost never happens. (I am reminded of the moment in Through the Looking Glass where Alice and the Gnat are talking about the Bread-and-butter-fly which lives on weak tea with cream and will die if it can't find any. “‘ But that must happen very often,’ Alice remarked thoughtfully. ‘It always happens,’ said the Gnat.”) But when it does happen, the feeling of lift-off—of being taken out of yourself, transported to a new plane of existence, filled with exhilaration and energy and delight—is practically unduplicatable. Hume has an essay called “Of Tragedy” wherein he ponders the old question about why we like to watch tragic events onstage when we don't at all enjoy witnessing them in real life. His answer, to the extent he finds one, has something to do with the fact that tragedy is an imitation, and “imitation is always itself agreeable.” I am not sure that I believe this. But I do agree with something else Hume says: that the exercise of human ingenuity, in piecing together a performed tragedy at its highest level, is itself pleasurable for other humans to watch. Or, as Hume puts it,
the genius required to paint objects in a lively manner, the art employed in collecting all the pathetic circumstances, the judgment displayed in disposing them: the exercise, I say, of all these noble talents, together with the force of expression, and the beauty of oratorical numbers, diffuse the highest satisfaction on the audience… By this means, the uneasiness of the melancholy passions is not only overpowered and effaced by something stronger of an opposite kind; but the whole impulse of those passions is converted into pleasure, and swells the delight which the eloquence raises in us.
As with most excellent criticism, there is no way of proving this assertion right or wrong, but at the very least it is psychologically astute. I have no doubt that something like this plays a part in my own strongly felt responses to the best performances I've seen, and I think it holds true for movies and books as well as plays. The sense of being placed in authoritative hands—led through the tragic experience by an intelligent and sensitive guide—cushions us from the most painful kind of grief even as it allows us to submit ourselves to another, softer, more enjoyable kind of sadness. So the
connection one feels in such cases is not just with the other members of an actual audience, but also with the maker of the artwork, and through him with all the other potential audience members on whom the work will have a similar effect.
The situation is more complicated with music. Though music can obviously make you feel sad, it is not clear that it can be tragic in Hume's sense of the word. This is not only because there is no way of knowing what an eloquent “imitation” would mean in such a context (what, exactly, could music be imitating, when it seems so clearly to be the thing itself?), but also because the springs of our reaction to music lie deeper than thought. I sometimes think that I have felt more, listening to some pieces of music, than I have at any other kind of performance—and I am not, as I have said, a particularly musical person. Part of what music allows me is the freedom to drift off into a reverie of my own, stimulated but not constrained by the inventions of the composer. And part of what I love about music is the way it relaxes the usual need to understand. Sometimes the pleasure of an artwork comes from not knowing, not understanding, not recognizing.
There is something I have not told you yet about that performance of the Brahms Requiem, the one I heard in Berlin the first time I visited the Philharmoniker hall. I have said that it had a powerful effect on me, but what I didn't tell you—what I didn't, perhaps, recognize myself until just this minute—was that the core of this whole book lay in that prolonged moment of listening. I went to Berlin thinking that I would write about David Hume there (as I always, for the past few years, have gone everywhere thinking I would write about David Hume). But as I sat in that acoustically perfect auditorium, feeling the waves of music pour over me—listening with my whole body, it seemed, and not just with my ears—I realized that I was going to have to write about Lenny instead.
